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WhatsApp is a messaging-only integration on Meta’s WhatsApp Cloud API. No posts, no comments, no analytics — a conversation channel.

Messaging

Send & receive, two ways.

Templates

Reach people outside the 24h window.

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Connect

WhatsApp uses Meta’s Embedded Signup: your user brings their own number, inside a Facebook-hosted flow that also creates or picks their WhatsApp Business Account.
Open the returned authUrl. The user signs in with Facebook, selects or creates a WABA, and verifies the phone number. PlugKit stores the number, exchanges a long-lived token and subscribes it to webhooks.
A test number issued by Meta’s API Setup screen carries a 24-hour token and will silently stop working the next day. Connect a real number.
If inbound messages ever stop arriving, re-subscribe the number without reconnecting it:

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Send a message

A thread is a conversation. Open (or find) one for a phone number in international format, then send into it:

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The 24-hour window

Meta accepts free-form text only within 24 hours of the contact’s last message. Past that, only an approved template goes through — free-form text doesn’t “mostly work”, it is rejected. List what the WABA has had approved:
Then send it, filling the {{1}}, {{2}} placeholders in order:
The name and language must match an approved template exactly. components is the escape hatch for headers and buttons — raw Meta components, passed through.

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Read the inbox

Inbound messages arrive by webhook. List and read them like any platform:
See Messaging for the full inbox, and Campaigns for broadcasts — which are governed by the same 24-hour window.

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When it stops working

An account carries isActive and needsReconnection, plus a disconnectedReason when we know it — check them before assuming a send failed for its own reasons:
Two WhatsApp-specific traps worth knowing:
  • Meta can refuse to serve the phone number while the token is perfectly valid — after a coexistence disconnect on the phone side, for instance. Sends then fail with a Meta error rather than an auth error.
  • Reconnecting the same number updates the existing account in place, so conversations and history are kept. If a reconnection ever lands on a second account for the same real number — a different WABA, say — fold it back with POST /v1/accounts/{id}/replace, which moves everything onto the account you keep and deletes the other.

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Permissions

whatsapp_business_messaging (send and receive) and whatsapp_business_management (business account and numbers).